


to be held by something reluctant to let go

by alienlesbian



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Sorry, LIKE A LOT OF ANGST, Mental Instability, Past Domestic Violence, References to Addiction, Requited Unrequited Love, Slight Smut, basically it's sad, brief mention: gay slurs, i spent two years trying to write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:40:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25188832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienlesbian/pseuds/alienlesbian
Summary: this will be a dark one, folks. what happens when the person you love leaves you behind and you can't come back from it? what happens if they come back and they're broken like you? the universe took something from them too? where do you go from there?AKAthe one where Erin leaves and the remnants of her departure and the stories and feelings she left behind play on a loop in Holtzmann's head.
Relationships: Erin Gilbert/Jillian Holtzmann, Jillian Holtzmann/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	to be held by something reluctant to let go

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first time writing for holtzbert and it's taken me two whole years to finally finish this and release it to the world. i tried my best to add all the warnings i could so make sure to read those first to be prepared! if you came for a happy ending, i am so very sorry.

When it becomes concrete and raw, it is recognizable as an imbalance, something not quite right but it’s here and it’s all you’ve got so you _take._

The decline from knowing which way is up and how to self-actualize that you are drowning in a pool of your own self pity

and restlessness

_and god when was the last time I slept?_

isn’t as obvious to you as it was before.

Yeah, there is no contact, no friendship, no love.

Not anymore.

The dreams of Erin are the only consistency, the only balance, the only good thing you have left. Is that so bad?

It made getting out of bed easier, it made going to classes, tinkering with experiments at the lab with the silent, sad acknowledgment of your peers resonating like waves down your narrow shoulders that still scratch the surface even now and then, something that’s easier to brush off and balance, it made eating a pear or drinking a pot of coffee less mundane because you know as soon you fall back into a pitiful sleep the next night, she’d be there.

That had to be enough, right? And the dreams were good, really really good.

There are crows flooding the sky making it dark at noon, a few would fall out of the sky and land in the mud of the seven mile worth or crop and heartache, dreams.

The crows all murmur grunts of happiness as they gently tumble and there are no woes to gripe over, no _this could be betters_ to imagine because it is all right here, in this hazy, blue-tinted universe built out of every beautiful thing you are made of and 17% more, here compiled and organized in a genius’ brain. 

In this dream, Erin wears a yellow cotton sundress that makes her look impossibly young, all soft lines, curves and too much heart. She smiles a lot in this dream and you think that’s why it’s one of your favorites.

You find her in the small cabin dining room, mixing cocktails with the leftover vodka, juices and limes.

She’s swaying her hips to the muffled beats of soft jazz and you walk up behind her and wrap your lithe arms around her waist and she’s not startled, her smile brightens and she leans her head further into your neck and you kiss the space where her neck meets her shoulder and it’s calming, making the colors surrounding you grow deeper.

You throw oranges and apple pie at her and they’d go right through her and you just laughed, because it didn’t matter. Not in this. There was never any pain to be felt in any of this. Pain didn’t matter.

In some dreams, you had the ability to fly, you’d soar through the sky and pick up paper bags of fruits and flowers and meet Erin in central park and kiss her in front of passersby and Erin blushed but never minded.

No one bat an eye at your tendency to take flight because it didn’t matter either, you would read Erin Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and play vinyl records of the Doors but it didn’t matter.

You’d camp side by side outside and the stars would fall into the fire pit before you, making it crackle and hiss below your sticky marshmallow puffs and shared tears but that doesn’t matter. You can’t even seem to recall why you both started crying, just that it felt reassuring that dream Erin felt exactly how she does in this small window of freedom.

In another, you were intertwined like vines wrapped in soft purple sheets.

There’s laughter, “kiss me here, and here, and here,” you whisper, pointing at all of your soft parts, parts that overtime you deemed unlovable, like bruises on an apple - there's always another that’s less damaged than you are, and Erin would.

_Cause I feel that when I’m with you, it’s alright, I know it’s right._

She’d love them and she kissed and kissed. 

_I love you like never before._

You’d trample on tomatoes after you lazily got out of bed, Erin would roll around and kiss you to make the sauce for pasta. She is so, so very beautiful.

_I could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm._

Wrapped in soft robes eating spaghetti curled up next to the small television set, a show on the discovery channel lulls on.

You always found yourself in some cabin in the woods when Erin and you would sleep together in these dreams. 

“Babe! Let’s go buy shovels,” Erin would squeal with soft childlike delight, pulling on your arm without taking her eyes off the screen, your eyes never leave her face, “we could be living on buried treasure and not even know it.”

_Could you ever really say no to her?_

“I’m a vampire, that’s why I have this CRAZY good pale complexion and manage to look this young,” you throw your arms out and point out your face and body to further prove your point, eyebrows raising high, “also, have you SEEN my incisors? They’re not this sharp for no reason! You’re the only human I trust to live to tell the tale!” you attempt to convince Erin as you walk around the hardware store in search of the aforementioned shovels.

You keep biting Erin’s arm the whole walk as evidence of your case.

“If you were really a vampire, you would be biting my neck, you know,” Erin gave as you carried shovels and swing your linked hands together. 

So, of course, you started biting her neck and Erin giggled and you swore it was the most beautiful sound you would ever hear. Like clouds gliding over your heart and making a home beneath the surface.

“Stooop,” Erin said, but there was no malice in her tone, you knew from her eyes alone that she didn’t mind at all.

Erin bought you ice cream with three scoops from the truck on the corner.

The lights in the Fairway parking lot kept freezing and flashing from where you stood, pacing back and forth in big steps. There was a blurred cacophony throughout the sky and the cement looked as if it were laid out by diamonds.

Erin’s wearing high-waisted jeans and a flowy maroon top, she always dresses comfortable in your dreams. You’re wearing a pair of hardly worn dungarees and your blazer buttoned up. 

You can’t find your cigarettes. You could have sworn you brought them with you, you always have them on your person in some spot but you can’t find them in any of your pockets. 

“Hurry up!” Erin said, not paying any mind to your addiction because in your dreams, that’s the least of anyone’s worries. 

The fact that your need for nicotine transferred to your dreams is a kink in the matrix you still haven’t figured out.

She was in a rush but you tell her, “what if there’s a hold up? What if we have to crouch and hide for HOURS with nothing to do or smoke?” 

_You kiss like addicts hungry for a hit._

‘Don’t be silly, Holtz,” Erin softly exclaims as you follow her into the store. The airy, toned down way Erin speaks makes you falter and almost want to cry but you don’t allow yourself to. 

It hurt too much.

You’re riding on the cart, pushing your way through the produce aisle with one foot up high behind you. Erin’s holding onto a melon, sniffing it and your head cocks to the side as you watch her, with an eyebrow raised in curiosity. 

You like this. 

You don’t have to talk to fill the silence because the silence is natural. 

You begin to thump a melon next to the one Erin just sat down when you hear somebody say, “Everybody, don’t move!”

You both drop to the ground instantly, a melon falling to the ground and breaking open without making a sound. You turn to Erin with a wry smile, leaning over closer to her, “I told you so,” you whisper. Erin lays her head on the ground in defeat in response.

You know you shouldn’t depend on these, these sweet imaginary, sad sad dreams. 

You know they’re not real, know that when you wake up in the too dark morning, Erin would be in another country and not curled around your form. 

They’re not real, but they’re a better ending than you had gotten and you try to be okay with that. 

They weren’t watching Erin leave to follow a dream you were never apart of and you try to find the hope in that.

You try to find a place that exists where you both could love each other and everything would fall back together. You have failed to find that place.

They’re not real but they did get worse. They got messy.

Your thoughts were too cleaned up, you know.

You found Erin in the middle of an empty highway. 

Her hair was dark from the rain and was slicked to her neck. She was wearing a brown trench coat and her arms were covered in tattoos of knives and scaly beings and dried blood flecked the lines of her eyelids. She swayed so gently, you could have sworn the wind followed her every move instead of the other way around.

The sky was red, the sand was red and the wind pierced your skin like a thousand tiny needles in the haze. 

There were flecks of foam on the corner of your mouth, your shirt was ripped to shreds and barely hanging onto your small, fragile body. 

Your hands never shook this hard before, not even in real time. 

The birds were watching Erin as she listened to the road and you watched her, listening to her heart beating. You could hear her breathing and it was the only thing keeping you from losing your shit. 

It takes you seconds of listening to the harsh wind and Erin’s heart to realize that your knees are bleeding from the impact of the rocks digging into your skin like arrowheads. You taste a hint of gravel in your mouth. Your chest begins to feel like you’re being smothered underneath a sack of lentils.

You walk over to Erin and the air feels like you are walking in slow motion, you pick her up and carry her to the car. She hardly weighs a thing. 

You drive her home but she isn’t making any sense anymore and the trees weren’t moving.

You take a shower and try to breathe, but your throat felt like it was closing up. You scratch at it, pawing at your only source of life until darkness overtook and you’re sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in a bright green towel and hyperventilating.

Erin is laying on top of the bedspread in a pair of your boxer shorts, watching What Dreams May Come with the lights off, she was talking, _to you_ , you thought, but she wasn’t making any sound.

“I’ve come to save you from Hell,” you mumbled because this got scary and you want to make Dream Erin smile or do something. You watch Erin’s face laugh but no sound came out.

It had been three months since Erin’s been gone in real time, Amsterdam being luckier than you ever were, but you still carry that fear, that she’s not coming back and the last time you saw her, you couldn’t even say goodbye. 

Erin’s skin started to look bluer in the glow of the television, her teeth looked yellow, her ribs delineated like a junkyard dog. Still wet and so tired, you laid down next to her,

_there’s nowhere to go now, you thought, there’s nowhere to go anymore._

On a particularly bad night, dream Erin is sitting in a bathtub at the hospital, and she was crying. 

Wait. 

Not the hospital. 

You meant to think about the bathtub at the buildings that were not the hospital. 

You shouldn’t have thought about the hospital. 

The bright lights, the feeling of ice cubes pressed against teeth, electrical humming and mental rewiring and the sounds of sobbing and clipboards and the lights are too bright, too clinical, too deadly,

_you don’t think you can take this much longer._

Erin’s tears are the same blue as her eyes and you clutch onto her hands but you can't feel her anymore. 

Erin hadn’t noticed you’d even touched her.

“It hurts, it hurts,” Erin whimpered, tears streaming down her pink cheeks, your heart beating so quickly you could see it managing to crawl out of your chest and attempt to guide Erin back.

One day, you can no longer grasp a handle on reality and fantasy, you both still groped for each other on the backstairs of the arcade or in parked cars in the cold frost but the restlessness of it all grew heavy in the back of your throat. 

More frequently, you were finding yourself sleepless and Dream Erin was running out of lullabies. So much so, you forgo sleep altogether.

You know that the lack of sleep will target your head space and make your ideas fuzzy and convoluted, your senses bordering out of control, but you’d rather deal with a migraine and a couple of third degree burns than live in a daydream of something that will never exist.

You’re working on an environmentally safe PKE meter in your studio apartment. It’s Friday, and you haven’t seen your friends since Sunday, when the dreams became too intense and you were convinced you were never going to wake up. 

Abby and Patty have been understanding and exceedingly supportive and you wonder if their love will ever run out, because there are only so many times someone can go to a pity party until they stop RSVPing.

You may or may not be glancing at your cell phone, left open on the kitchen counter. It’s far enough away that you can’t read anything, but close enough to know if the screen is different than three seconds before you last checked.

What was that line again? Repeating something over and over again with the same result is insanity? Or leads to insanity? What if you’re already at that point, how do you know and how can you stop it?

JH: i’m still trying to figure out what to say. i mean, like, yea you fucked me over and this fucking sucks, but i still think you’re great. idk if that says more abt me or more abt you idk if that makes me pathetic, kindhearted, insane, or neither or all of the above.. i.. i always thought you were great [sent]

JH: i realize i didn’t always act like you were important to me. i’m sorry for that. i’m sorry i didn’t shove it down your throat every single day, tell u that u were worth everything to me; i’m sorry i held this against u. i’m sorry i was so stuck with my own selfish head up my ass that i didn’t realyze u were struggling too. [sent]

JH: aBT all those voicemails and txts, i was drunk and sad and honestly jus missing u not that i miss u or anything because [sent]

You’ve been internally berating yourself since you recalled the texts and voicemails, watching the phone like it could explode any second. You noticed that the delivered line changed five minutes ago.

You try not to think about it. You try not to let it affect you.

You can’t tell if your heart is racing from the third pot of coffee, deprivation of sleep or the fact Erin read your text five minutes ago. You think it’s from the coffee, hope it’s from the coffee, know it’s from the coffee but you’d be a liar if you said you weren’t scared.

Erin once commented she gets bored of people easily when speaking of someone she went on a date with and you were always tireless, always waiting for Erin to get bored of you, to tire of your muchness, to want to leave the room upon noticing your presence.

You want so badly to be different, to tone down your larger than life personality, pop a lid on it, calm the quake before it shakes down everything and everyone around you, but you can’t. You never could, never will.

You check your phone again, and make a mental note to stop looking every thirty seconds expecting it to change - you’re not a bad scientist. You know these things. It’s been seven minutes. You turn the phone off.

So, you may have been drinking a little too much lately. So, you may have a problem that you might have to go back to your psychiatrist for, again, but that is something for a day you’re sober and today is not that day. 

You haven’t left the apartment because you called in to both class and work sick, you didn’t mean to. Not really. But all you could think of was _Erin Erin Erin_ and it made you feel ill and you already knew you couldn’t start a big poof today.

You just wanted to mean something to Erin. You want Erin to realize that you don’t do all of this for everyone, or just anyone. You remembered specifics, that catered only to her, would travel far and wide for her favorite tea at any time of day, would donate every non-vital organ plus $80 and a bus pass to ensure Erin’s happiness for eternity. 

You want Erin, more than a friend or not a friend or _can someone remind me if we’re friends still???_

You always forget Erin doesn’t love you and it hits you hard in the face, like when Jerry Nelson kicked sand in your eyes in elementary school and your therapist at the time told you it was because Jerry liked you and didn’t know how to express it properly. 

You drop the bottle of rum that you didn’t notice was already empty anyway, set your wrench on the floor and crawl into bed. The body pillow hanging off the bed being pulled into a vertical position and you spoon it, pretending it’s really your person and allow yourself to cry. 

It’s your home, you can lie if you want to.

The week before you stopped sleeping, you were in the lab tinkering with a new project when you overheard Abby on speaker phone with Erin.

She’s doing good now. She found someone and she’s kissing them. 

It’s been three months.

You briefly wonder, selfishly, in stutters and self murmurs if they know about you, but a part of you hopes they don’t. You really just want to know if Erin refers to you as a one night thing, a mistake. 

It didn’t feel like a one night thing, though. 

Erin kept a toothbrush on your sink and extra shirts and underwear in your top drawer. You slept in Erin’s bed more than you did your own. Erin knew that you liked the left side of the bed with two pillows and always made sure you knew it was yours.

She made a list of foods she knew repaired liver damage on your fridge because let’s face the facts, you’re impulsive and like to replace ache with burns, mix red bull and tequila for breakfast, fight fire with a blowtorch in each hand with ABBA blasting through the speakers.

Erin always asked you if you ate that day, and would offer you your favorite foods but never forced you to eat. She kissed you after you got off the phone with your mother knowing you weren’t going to be okay. Erin always apologized when you flinched at old wounds that still haven’t healed. 

She’d ask stories about all of your scars and listened with full, undivided attention to each and every one then spend the rest of the night tracing them over with her lips, over and over. 

Erin would keep Abby updated, knowing that she was the only person you had besides Erin, when you were in trouble. She remembered where it was okay to touch you and where it wasn’t. She used to fight for you, for whatever you both became.

She doesn’t anymore. Maybe, you read too far between the lines and they got blurry, you can’t even see the lines anymore. 

This is what happens when you lose your head in the crossfire and refuse to face it.

The recollection of kicking Erin out of your bed is a fuzzy memory you don’t have, but waking up next to her, with her warm body koala-wrapped around your waist after that night in January where Erin confessed she loved you ever since, where you confessed you loved her ever since, holding her, kissing her cheek, making love in the soft glow of her bedroom, you couldn’t get it out of your head.

The cold car ride after getting dressed the next morning was filled with misty silence. Erin was holding onto your hand tightly, thoughts running 20 miles over the speed limit until she finally tells you the Bad Thing, the Bad Thing where she leaves out any stutters and says,

_"Listen Holtz, I didn’t mean to say any of that last night. It was the drinks (the warmth, the safety you carry). I’m sorry, you’re just, larger than life and I’m too scared to fall like that, we’re unpredictable, life is unpredictable. I can’t keep up. But I will always remember this._

The Bad Thing, where there’s ice on all of the roads and your heart dropped into your stomach, where there’s ice on all of the roads and you don’t care because you’re reckless and your eyes can’t focus and you feel hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.

There’s a red light. 

You both revolve around danger and _I am not the enemy, the trees are not ghosts, Erin, you’re haunting yourself,_ but you don’t say that.

Instead, you tell Erin, it’s okay, it’s fine. It’s not like we were anything permanent, or serious.

Not for the first time, you wonder when you’ll both be able to convince yourselves you’re okay enough to believe it, you wonder if either of you ever really will be.

Afterwards, Erin moved to work downstairs for the rest of the day before she leaves.

You begin your work pretending nothing happened, pretending your legs aren’t vibrating and your brain isn’t radiating static, pretending it’s fine and that you still know how to use your hands. 

You pretend that you know what good things are and how to keep them and how to be ‘normal’, pretend your quirks are mere jokes across the dinner table and not an entire part of you, what makes you wonderful. 

You pretend that you broke that bolt from tightening it too much because of lack of sleep and not because of a beautiful woman in tweed who is your everything and left and now you can’t maintain and why wasn’t I enough? What can I do to be smarter and better and someone Erin (stop saying her name) would want to love?

Patty’s sitting at what usually is Erin’s desk but has since switched and she’s watching your distanced stare as you move almost robotically around the room.

She sets down her book and studies you.

Nothing is simple and squared away and everyone knows but won’t talk about it; Patty and Abby for more obvious reasons, knowing it’s not their place, and Erin likes to bury her feelings inside and resort to safer measures she deems practical and you displace fixation hoping to heal with distractions in the form of metal objects and alcoholic beverages and pretty girls that will leave.

“Baby, is everything alright?” Patty says softly after awhile, hoping her voice carries over the melancholy music and overwhelming silence.

You stop using your wrench immediately, mutely congratulating yourself for your lip quivering for only seventeen seconds, and look over at Patty. 

Seeing Erin’s old desk, with the Hawaiian bobble head she got when she was thirteen and the framed photo of them all at the Fall Festival last year with your head laid on Erin’s shoulder and arms haphazardly splayed around her tall frame and you try not to let your entire soul ache from the loss of it all.

“Yeah, Pats, I’m just tired. Couldn’t sleep. Is that a cookie?” you let out in one breath while now staring at Patty’s hands, hands that hold two double chocolate chip cookies - that happen to be Jillian Holtzmann’s FAVORITE cookie.

Patty knows this, kept it cataloged in her head for anytime you overwork yourself or need a pick me up.

“I thought I’d want them for my sweet tooth but my head hurts. How about you eat these for me, Holtzy? I know how you feel about cookies being wasted,” she smiles knowingly and lays them on a napkin.

“A cookie that delicious should NEVER go to waste!”

With that, you glide over in large steps and a giant grin and swipe up the cookies, plucking them both in your mouth. You climb onto Patty’s lap and curl into her like a cat.

“Thank you, ‘m sorry,” you murmur and Patty hates hearing you apologize but knows exactly why you feel it is necessary, why you think you need to, and sweet, perceptive Patty knows that you don’t need to hear another person telling you to stop doing something that you only do to provoke comfort and happiness for others, never yourself.

So she hugs you close, and grabs her book - happy to let you munch away in her lap humming show tunes with a smile on your face.

AY: so this guy with a faux hawk came up to our table earlier to ask patty to let him buy her a drink  
AY: i know you don’t care but holtz,,, he had a faux hawk,,, he looks like he’s having a midlife crisis at 42  
JH: (1 hour later) sometimes all u can say is ‘yikes’ and move tf on lol did u guys leave after that  
JH: also can u please bring chips  
JH: it’s an emergency  
AY: emergency??? what’s the emergency??  
JH: i don’t have any chips

“I don’t love her anymore.”

You’re sitting for lunch, you’re surprised you can say that without flinching. Patty and Abby look skeptical but are more so happy to see you outside and eating something.

It has been four months.

You have been making a habit of telling everyone you don’t love her anymore, that you don’t think or cry about her, and you’re mostly not wrong about that last one. 

Only at night, under the covers and the guise of the moon, no one’s watching so no one knows and it doesn’t matter anyway.

_(it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.)_

You have been trying to find a way to disappear quietly, maybe run away to the Netherlands and live in a closeted cabin somewhere west, but nothing about Jillian Holtzmann is quiet. 

_(you had tried to become smaller, now you’re shrinking slowly.)_

It’s not like you both ever planned a forever, nor promised an eternity. You knew each other too well, both knew what was happening and that all fire burns out even if it takes an entire summer.

Lost in context stained voicemails drowned with _(where is your heart)_ and _(where is mine)_ and _(what happened when you cut it out of my chest)_ and maybe you and Erin were too alike, both too plagued by your brains, both not caring about the future but the nagging in your head caring all! too! much! and maybe you calculated the ending far too long and screwed the results but you have always been good at math.

It was never built to last because fires burn out and you’re always losing lighters and how long does using your own body heat to warm others last before there is no more warmth left inside of you?

You would have given the future of the universe for another January morning wrapped around Erin.

-

It’s bordering on five months since the Bad Thing.

You meet her in a scene much more akin to a movie, the drunk degenerate walking the streets of new york city at night saving the damsel in distress because you both were in the wrong place at, fortunately, the right time.

She looked about a few inches taller than your 5’3” stature, head of soft mussy vibrant red hair and wearing a beaten up leather jacket and fishnets, fear taking over her features, blood on her skirt and a gun pointed over her face.

You remember that face, posters from a dumpster, something about a missing woman from San Francisco but you’ve been having trouble focusing lately.

The situation gathered in blurs.

Your need to prove yourself as someone who can do something without talking or being too much, too wrong, outweighing any warning signs of the risks. 

You catch the attacker from behind, the gun shooting off a bullet somewhere between a dumpster and thousands of damp loose paper. The gun falls somewhere, and the woman throws dagger hits at the attacker while you kick his legs from underneath standing body ending with an unconscious and unknown man blacked out on the gross concrete and the woman walking to your apartment with your trench coat wrapped around her.

“You saved my life,” she kept whispering the short walk, big brown eyes making multiple attempts to focus on your face, “I owe you so much.”

“Uh, no, ya don’t,” you say bluntly, your voice not sounding like yours anymore from the disuse over the months, “you don’t owe me anything, let’s keep going now.” But this woman is relentless, this woman you just barely met and haven’t even a name to fit the blood smeared but so so beautiful face and you can’t focus, can’t do this.

“I owe you,” the woman says again, voice more hard, insistent, “your shoes are covered in mud and filling with your own fucking blood, just tell me what you want. you can have it, i swear.”

You avert your eyes, back and forth from the sidewalk to the lamp posts, you can’t look at this woman, can hardly speak, can hardly keep your legs from falling underneath you and hitting your face against gravel.

“I did it for all of the wrong reasons, lady, I could just as soon kill you myself if I wanted to so please stop,” it’s morbid, and quiets the woman but it doesn’t matter. 

You make it to your apartment door and pull out a hefty key chain filled with keys of all sizes and shapes from your jumpsuit and find a dark green one and insert it into the lock.

“Let’s not talk about it, mkay? Let’s just.. not talk.. at all.” 

You open the door, allowing her in and you both remove your shoes and you set both pairs outside because they’re bloody and wet and you don’t want to remember any of this night.

You hand the woman a towel and spare clothes and show her to the bathroom.

It’s not that you hadn’t thought of any of the risks of this entire situation. You had. 

It’s not that you don’t believe this woman is being genuine, not because you don’t want any of this, you kind of do. It’s selfish, you don’t think you can handle another night alone.

But this is how it keeps going, you’re always saving and some poor woman is always owing and you’re tired of asking to settle the debt. It’s not like it matters, it’s not like anyone ever means it and it only makes you feel that much more ashamed and sorry for yourself.

You wallow in your own self-deprecating mindset, you have convinced yourself that you do not deserve good things, so you try your best to destroy every single one of them that comes to you.

The woman steps out into the living room, hair dripping slightly and wearing your clothes. She sits next to you wordlessly. 

She seems like a good thing.

Ten minutes of silence come and go, “my name is Archie, by the way,” the woman, Archie, softly exhales, pushing a piece of damp hair behind her ear.

“Uh, Holtzmann. you, you can call me Holtzmann.”

“Listen, I really do-,”

“NOPE. Don’t. There’s only one thing I want but don’t make me say it, please. Just, just get me bandages please, out of my cupboard, next to the bathtub.”

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from crying in frustration and stare at the heels of your feet, still bloodied. 

It hurts but the close proximity of another beautiful woman looking at you as if you can save them stings more than anything else. 

Archie just stares at you, head cocked slightly to the side.

“I’m bleeding, Archie, I’m not just making polite conversation. Please, cupboard, next to the bathtub, and the peroxide.”

Archie obeys and scurries to the bathroom, you can hear her making quick work of gathering supplies and force out a large breath you didn’t realize you were holding. 

Judging by the way she moves around and the progress of her clothes, the blood on Archie when you found her wasn’t her own and you were too exhausted to determine if that should worry you or not, or if you really gave a shit at all.

There’s a timid silence as you bandage your feet and forearm where the man bit into your skin.

A seventh or twelfth infomercial later, you’re both hazy eyed and the silence is sad now and neither of you planned any of this out, the light of the room feels brighter, louder thinking of how to go about this.

“Um, can I sleep in your bed?” Archie says, looking up at you with bloodshot bambi eyes and you just now realize that Archie was halfway laying on your lap. She looks smaller, somehow.

“Ha, I don’t know if that’s.. a good idea,” you warn lowly, scared for her more than yourself, “I’ll want to.. I’ll want to touch you, kiss you, ruin you. It’s not bright.”

Archie sits up at this, a mischievous glint in her eyes as if she found the key to everything she ever wanted and cocks a small grin. She doesn’t listen, doesn’t care. 

You don’t think she even believes you.

This is the most honest you’ve ever been. You do this. You take the things you love and tear them apart, or pin them down and pretend they’re yours.

So, you narrow your eyes at her and slowly lean in. Her eyes flicking from your lips and back. You know she wants this.

You press your lips hard against hers, there’s a lot of teeth and it’s sloppy. She tastes like toothpaste and coconut and she deepens the kiss as soon as you do.

Your lips mold with hers like they belong together, you reach your hand up to thread through her hair and grip, pulling her head back and it makes her whimper into your mouth. You do it once more so her lips part and you can dip your tongue inside.

She starts to crawl into your lap and straddles you, arms around your neck, grinding herself into you hard as she settles in. Your other hand slides around her to squeeze her ass and hold it there, sometimes using it to grind her into your lap harder, make her squirm.

You begin to kiss her jawline down to her throat and sink your teeth into the spot where her neck meets her shoulder and Archie lets out the sweetest groan you’ve ever heard.

You use this position to pick Archie up, her legs wrapping around your waist on reflex. You flinch for half a second at the pressure on your feet but it becomes easier to ignore.

You walk the short distance and deposit her on the bed, removing her clothes in slow, agonizing motions as she writhes below you. Her skin a smooth unexplored universe and you not feeling worthy of stumbling upon on it.

She looks at you like she could love you and that makes it hard for you to look at her without choking on the stale air rising in the room. You begin to leave trails of wet kisses and teeth marks on her neck down to between her legs.

You allow the heels of her feet to bruise your shoulders as you use your mouth to taste her, ruin her, she lets out a symphony of curses and your name.

After Archie hands over everything she has, you let her sleep in your bed. You do not let her touch you.

Her head is tucked in the crook of your arm as you count the freckles on your ceiling. 

Maybe now, she will leave you alone.

Maybe now, that’s not what you want anymore. 

You huff out a groan, turn over to wrap your uninjured arm around her. You can smell your own shampoo in her hair you try to relax in the momentary lapse of sadness that it brings.

The problem with this newfound situation is that Archie is amazing.

She makes pancakes with chocolate chips and cuts your grilled cheese into two triangular pieces and she doesn’t look at you with concern when she sees you take morning shots right out of the bottle. 

The problem is that you started with too much blood and not enough gentle. The problem is that you find yourself comparing Archie to Erin and that’s not fair to anyone.

There’s something about the parts of Archie that scream Erin like how she parts her hair in the morning, and that tweed blazer she tried on at the department store, how she wraps her arm around your arm when you explain experiments to her and she watches with fascination, like she really cares about your work.

Archie was the first person who asked you stories about your scars since Erin, but she didn’t ask you about the right ones and you can’t blame her for that. 

There are stories in the world, stories about the universe no one really wants or needs to hear. There are stories where you don’t want to confess anything, where you don’t want to say you ran out into that alley that night to prove something. 

The problem with this situation is that maybe there really is something about your alcohol dependency that you won’t admit, and the way your stomach lining and liver are fucked and you don’t eat as much as you used to but when you tell Patty, Abby or Archie that you’re still going to your therapist, you go out and buy a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine and sit at the abandoned park near your apartment that holds memories far too big to hold in your palm.

You don’t want to go back to therapy. You don’t want to tell anyone you ran out into that alley to prove something, that she didn’t love you anymore, that you hoped the gun would misfire.

Displacing fixation doesn’t heal old wounds but you might lose your shit if you have to go to a therapist again. They make you feel crazy, bottled up, out of sorts and maybe you are, but you can’t face that. 

Not right now. Not when there’s a beautiful woman waiting for you at home every day who says she loves you and sounds like she really means it.

You find yourself picking up memories from the past like unwanted fleas, memories of sophomore year, pre-Erin and exposure to numbing drinks for the first time with Amy Burkhart at a rooftop party.

Amy was your deathbed scene, take one. 5”7’, slim and pale. Silvery blonde hair and a voice like gravel, she was worse than any drug and twice as beautiful. Being addicted to Amy almost killed you, your spirit that is.

After finishing up your last classes for your first semester of college, you got invited by a girl in a seminar you went to last month to a rooftop party in Midtown. 

You thought it was accidental but decided if nothing else, you could at least get drunk in celebration of getting a break. When you get there, it’s all champagne glasses and cold shaky hands. You mumble for a vodka soda because it’s the only drink you can think of at the top of your head and since you’ve never had time to go out to a bar, you were scared to look like you didn’t belong. That’s all you wanted. To belong. 

So, hardly one hour in, you’re slurring to a woman you don’t know about how when everything is falling and there’s so much shit in the universe, two things have to be going to the same place, and you realized two things in this moment: one being that this shitty vodka made your head feel fuzzy but light, for once, and two being that this woman in front of you was smiling and beautiful and she has blue eyes. There are an infinite amount of shades of blue, you think. So no one will ever have the same eyes as the woman in front of you. 

You kissed her, your lips were numb and cold from the night wind and she kissed you back with a bit of roughness and her hands felt like they sank into your hips instead of placed there but you don’t think you mind because you’re being kissed by a beautiful girl and you can’t remember the last time anyone held you so you let her, and you don’t stop and when you wake up, you’re in a bed next to her and you can hardly remember anything past the stale taste of your tongue and your clothes on her floor.

You’re in a hotel room fifteen stories up and the windows are locked and you laugh like it’s funny. She mumbles something in her sleep and pulls you back next to her warm, soft body and you let her.

Amy saw you as nothing more than a piece of decor on the wall, a fallow field, turn your back into a table so she wouldn’t have to eat from the table or get any of the dishes dirty.

She got comfortable. It only felt right to feel comfortable too, right? 

She told you she’d never hurt you and that’s why you didn’t kick her when she was pressed into you almost painfully in the middle of the night, just quietly asked her to scoot over.

She bad mouthed you in private and said the stickiest sweet comments about you to her friends the next day, so lovely you could blush if you hadn’t lost part of your warmth. You didn’t know why you felt this bit of emptiness. Where did it come from? What used to be there?

Amy would drink too much, would yell too loud and failed to notice you suffering, your head pounding from the sensory overload and state of panic. 

On rare nights, she falls asleep from exhaustion and not too much whiskey and you exhale because maybe tonight you’re safe, even though you’re not, even though you love her and that puts you in danger.

Even though you are in danger.

You never tell anyone, you don’t know how to say you hurt me to her. 

You wish you could.

“You are no good, you’ve lost your head,” Amy would say to you, she’d take you in her arms, hold you sweet and close, she’s push your flesh around. She wanted to see if you could ever be ugly. You, _a boxer in the ring’s sweet release_ , but god, you’re beautiful. You were in love. You were innocent. 

How do you challenge innocence? 

You can’t. 

Amy would hit you, and hit you, and hit you, desire driving the hands you used to hold gently, right into your softest parts, parts you were still trying to love. 

You wanted to think of yourself as someone who would never let someone hit her.

You wanted to be in love. You were in love. Amy said she loved you too, but you are running out of places to hide bruises. 

Look, you loved her enough to let her do this.

Wrong choice of words, you think. You didn’t let her do anything. 

Maybe.

She would tell you she would never hurt you again the next morning, always the next morning when the bruises were darkening and the swelling was tender, and you’d whisper in a tapered, tired voice, _it’s too late. it’s already too late. You don’t remember the crash, never remember the crash, but yes, you were driving, and no, it wasn’t your fault._

You forgave her each time, saying it was okay, weren’t you just consenting to it at this point?

You remember reciting it each and every time. You wear the pain like a badge of pride, say look, I loved you enough to let you do this. Like you didn’t have your hands out the window like you were looking at a light, like Amy wasn’t becoming her father, like you weren’t always surrendering yourself to something. 

It became agreed upon nature, just the way of things, but you always surrendered yourself to her. Less like a fight, and more like a hostage negotiation and no one understands or wants to know what it’s like to talk a gun out of someone’s hands when it’s right in front of your face and the finger is twitching ever so close to the trigger. 

You can’t go to the hospital because they have to report gunshots, there are many other things hospitals have to report, too.

There were a lot of questions you were not allowed to answer, you’d been making up stories for her and telling too many lies.

You wanted to speak up, you wanted to say something, but your mouth felt like a jail cell, you felt chained to this body. It was less about weight now and more about all of the blood in the carpet.

You wanted to say something but turns out you didn’t have to say anything. 

Because a month later, Amy cheated on you and you thought of yourself as someone who would never let their girlfriend cheat on you so you broke up with each other.

Amy moves to Montreal with the woman who managed to get the gentle parts of her. She didn’t call you back.

You still think of it as your fault. 

You never wanted to hurt her so you never will. That’s the difference.

The next year without Amy was surreal for you. Her goodbye left you feeling hollow.

You realized that she was so much of you, and so much of your life that you didn’t know where to go from there, which way was up. You lost every bit of confidence you built that summer, or maybe it never really existed at all.

You were suddenly twelve years old again and shy, exhausted, hands always shaking and covered in soot and you never wanted these emotions again.

Sometimes, when you start as messy as a gunfight in a darkened alleyway, there isn’t enough fight in you to make a good ending because you spent all of your energy to form a beginning. When you start a relationship like that, too much blood and broken glass on the floor, you shouldn’t be able to end it the same way.

It starts after you told Archie you went to see Dr. Edwards _(even though you didn’t) (even though you spent the afternoon in your car chain smoking with the windows up hoping to pass out) (but you never did)._

You’re both six shots in and you’re begging her to sit on the floor and love you and she says yes because six shots has a way of getting her to say yes even to things she doesn’t want to do.

You keep it gentle, you stay in your old apartment more than you spend it at Archie’s or with your friends. You keep in contact often though and you finish your work and take Archie to brunch and the botanical gardens for your anniversary.

It takes another week before you’re over at Archie’s fucking her again, but she lets you sleep in bed the whole time after because she knows it’s a safe space for you. She still holds your hand in front of everyone who walks nearby on the street and you give her piggyback rides.

It stays simple like this until one night you’re more than nine shots in and she’s still sober and you’re sobbing in her bed until it’s not a safe space anymore and you run back to your apartment for razor blades and chug vodka straight out of the bottle because alcohol is a blood thinner and in that moment you’re more than okay with bleeding out _(you don’t have to make it that far) (she carries you back into her room and has you sleep on the couch)._

It gets to the point where you have to stop pretending that when you hurt yourself, she doesn’t feel it too and you can’t stop crying and neither can she and you hold each other together with bloody hands and you tape her up like a wristband and pretend it’s not completely fucked up anymore.

She gets sick of you calling her in the middle of the night and having to lock her medicine cabinets when you come over and when you have panic attacks when she touches you the same way Amy did and you get sick of hurting her so you begin to pick fights, give her excuses to leave, until one day she screams in your face that she never really loved you. You don’t hide your flinch, you pick your clothes off of her floor.

She texts you four days later asking why you pick so many fights with her and you don’t know what to say. Good things never last and you’re always ready for the breakdown. She knew that loving you would be impossible, so you gave her a free pass home. 

Don’t collect $200, Archie, just never answer the door for me again and let the call go to the voicemail you never cared to set up.

You’re picking at the loose leaves of paper in the spirals of your notebook, pulling them out and ripping them into microscopic pieces and forming shapes on the desk with them. 

Chemistry was your favorite course at the time, okay, not better than Physics but it was up there. It was something hands on and you were always good at that.

You could talk about the behavior and changes of matter just as long as you could talk about wanting to discover evidence for super symmetry and wanting to be the scientist to fix the mass of the Higgs boson yourself.

So no one would talk to you, you made yourself small in your seat and sat further to the back of the room than usual, so you could take up less space. Interactions with people scared you the most upon returning back to college. Spending the last three weeks not speaking to anyone and simply motoring through with other actions to fill the space. 

The sky was so blue, it made you feel smaller, like it could open up inside of you.

A pretty woman with brown hair and lengthy limbs sat next to you, and offered a small shy smile. 

“Hi, I’m Erin. Girlbert. Wait, I mean, Gilbert, Erin Gilbert, uh they asked us to pick partners, and you didn’t move and um, if it’s okay, you totally don’t have to, but I was wondering if I could..” the woman, Erin, finally exhaled after exclaiming all of that in two breaths and it made you instantly relax from your previously stiff posture and smile easily. People, girls in particular, get nervous around you all the time because you dress outwardly gay and you have soft lips, a pretty face and are obviously good with your hands. It was territory you felt safe in, but had lost custom to awhile ago. 

“Come here often?,” you cocked your head to the side and licked your lips, “Name’s Holtzmann, Jillian Holtzmann,” you exclaimed excitedly at the prospect of a new and not to mention, VERY beautiful friend. 

You held your hand out to shake, which Erin did, her own face relaxing, as if she didn’t expect you to actually want her around, “BUT, I like Holtzmann better. I’ll be your partner, in the class, as well, Girlbert,” you continued, winking at the nickname and it made Erin begin to bloom pink. 

The sight swelled you with pride. Nothing is better than making a pretty girl blush. 

“Nice to meet you, Holtzmann,” Erin tests the name like she’s learning a new language, “and thanks, I.. think? What a nice day it is, huh?”

You look out the window, at the blue blue sky, and then looked back at the blue of Erin’s eyes and realized you liked Erin’s blue a lot better, better than any blue you’d ever seen, realized that it is now your favorite shade of blue of all time. 

You also realized you were probably very highly likely going to fall in love with Erin. 

You didn’t know how to handle that in your stomach at the moment.

You came together naturally. Erin’s two best friends, Abby & Patty, fall platonically head over heels for you, and they share ghost stories and scientific theories and history subjects and spill them over the cafeteria lunch table and at each other’s apartments and it had to be the closest thing to happiness and actual family that you’d ever gotten.

The summer after you met Erin and classes were a thing to wait about, you were practically inseparable. You would talk about anything and nothing and get to know each other in the park, underneath the stars, and in your apartments. 

You hang out with Patty and Abby and find that you feel comfortable around them in a way you never have and it makes you feel less guilty about breathing some days.

One scorcher of an afternoon, you’re standing outside of a 7/11 with Erin sighing by your side. She’s kicking her beat up sneakers into a puddle next to the curb, watching the water spray in minimal fashion, the water had one of those rainbow oil slicks in it and it felt all too ironic.

Cassidy is talking loudly to her boyfriend on the phone, making you and Erin wait in the impossible heat because she was driving and didn’t want anyone to hear the conversation.

Cassidy is Erin’s friend, they met in Spanish class years ago. She’s a redhead and her new boyfriend is a football scholar. Typical. 

She’s what everyone wishes they could be, that was no different for Erin. Every time Erin hangs out with her, she tells you that she silently wishes her acceptance in society and everyday life would rub off on her. She’d been there through a lot of her rough spots, and stuck around. She still doesn’t believe she deserves her.

You are sifting through the coins in your worn out leather wallet to see if you have enough to buy everyone slushies. “I swear,” you mutter under your breath, “I had another quarter.”

“You really, really don’t have to do that, Jill,” Erin repeated for the third time, feeling guiltier by the second, “you honestly can just get one for yourself instead.

You look up, eyebrows furrowing in concern, “stop that,” you say, “you said you wanted one, and I’m gonna get us all one. No take-backs, right?”

“Uh, well, I changed my mind,” Erin mutters, “what if you just get two and then I’ll split one with Cass? I only want a little bit anyway.”

You roll your eyes and Erin’s eyes flash with something of a quiet understanding. Her eyes flick over to Cass in the jeep her father bought her for her sixteenth birthday, practically yelling at her boyfriend over some pointless thing or five. She knows what you are thinking, you aren’t the type that would spend your Friday’s around someone like Cassidy, but you came for her sake, which Erin was always eternally grateful for.

You head into the convenience store, Erin following with inches between you.

“Okay, I don’t get it,” you say finally, looking up at the slushie flavors as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the world, avoiding her stare pointedly, “you know she’s not good to you, so, why do you stick around her?”

She raises one narrow shoulder blade in a half-assed shrug and chews on her bottom lip.

“I.. had been pretty shitty when I was, you know,” this is where she pauses, where she doesn’t say out loud that she was catastrophically mentally and physically ill, tried to hurt herself by hurting everyone else around her and licked anything with the desire it could possibly kill her, but she also kind of does say it because it needs to be said. 

You already know, understand, because every time she gets close to that, she promises herself never-not-ever-again, “it’s not fair to expect her to change overnight when it took me, like, half of my entire life.”

You fill your cup while listening, letting out an exhale of a sigh. Your fingers are twitching around the foam cup.

“Yeah,” you say, “but that whole time, you had wanted to change, you worked until you had changed. She just, ya’know, says it and never follows through.”

She takes that second to look over at Cassidy through the decals on the store window, “she’s just, got a long road and a lot of problems.”

“You know why we’re in here, muffin?” you ask, eyebrows raised and she’s thankful for the subject change. She blushes slightly, she always does when you use that nickname and she shakes her head. You hold up your wallet, grinning so big Erin’s heart races, “I found the quarter.”

“Oh! That’s awesome!” she exclaims, “I can pay you back tomorrow, or we can honestly just skip this entirely and you can save your cash.”

You look at her while pouring a blue raspberry slushie, chewing on the inside of your cheek and she can tell you're devising something.

“How about… I bet you the whole cost of this drink,” your eyes narrow, “that not only would she have refused to share, but she won’t even remember to ask if she should pay for it.’

“Well, hey! That’s not fair..” she says, smacking your arm gently.

You just shake your head, “people like that are always more comfortable when they’re taking. And she knows you think so little of yourself that you believe you deserve to be friends just on the basis you know how to give.” 

Her eyes downcast, out of the corner of her eye she watches you opening a straw by smashing it against your palm, putting the open end in your mouth and blowing the paper into the little can beside you.

“She takes, you give. She takes your time, your energy, your patience and you give her chance after chance because you genuinely believe she deserves it, for some reason, and because you give her the opening, she takes it.”

“She gives sometimes,” she whispers, her hands are shaking and her grip becomes a little too tight on the foam cups base. She steadies her focus on the machine in front of you, pouring blue raspberry into the cup. 

You snort too loud, taking a giant slurp of your slushie before frowning out of the window for a second.

“Yeah, when other people are watching and she needs to pretend she’s a good person. Has she ever given you anything without instagramming how nice she was for doing it first?”

She doesn't answer that, can’t face what she already knows is accurate because really, Cassidy tries and is the only person besides you and Abby who hasn’t totally outcast Erin since she got better. 

You pay at the register, Erin holding both her drink and Cassidy’s. She got her favorite flavor because she knows it, she pays attention, because it seems like something you should know about your friends. You know Erin’s by heart.

You hold the door, not opening it yet, just watching Cassidy through the glass, watching her pace in the parking lot. “I know you love her, but she’s the kind of person who will take a picture because she looks good in it and wants to show off how many people love her,” your eyes flick over to hers, “you’re in those pictures because you love her, not because she loves you.”

Erin stares into her slushie in silence, no response forming. She knows you aren’t intending to wound, but it still hurts.

You both walk back out into four hundred degrees. Eventually, Cassidy hangs up her phone. You get back into the car, Erin reaches up to pass the drink to her. “Thank you,” she says without looking back. She doesn’t offer to pay. Erin avoids the look you’re throwing at her and shrugs. It’s hot, and who really cares? 

An hour later, everyone’s sitting by the pool in Cassidy’s backyard. You are laying flat on your back with both of your legs in the pool. Swaying on the opposite side of Erin, furthest away from Cassidy.

Cassidy looks up at Erin, squinting from the sun, “what’s on your lips?” she asks.

“It’s blue raspberry,” she replies, smiling, “it’s my favorite. We could have shared it.” 

Your heart clenches protectively.

Cassidy’s eyes are already back on her phone, typing endlessly, “like, don’t be offended,” she says without looking back up, “but I honestly don’t care about that stuff,“ she examines a broken nail, “also, I don’t share.”

Okay, maybe someone was right. Maybe that someone was already taking that exact moment to look at her over their shoulder, “that’s a dollar and three cents,” you whisper, smirking lightly but no hint of malice in your tone, “if we were including taxes, of course.”

“I’ll get it to you,” she promises.

You squint up at the sky, sighing for the hundredth time today, focusing on the frayed end of your shirt, “I believe you,” you reply hoping to cover up your voice cracking with a clearing of your throat, “that’s the problem.”

She tries to ignore the itching feeling in her palms while watching you take your shirt off and jumping into the pool, making Cassidy scoff.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. You bought a bottle of rum to share with Erin as you both walked to the park near your apartment after class, swapping a thermos of soda to and fro. The park has multi-colored tunnels and screechy swing sets and a clear pond with frogs and you declared it both you and Erin’s space, our space, because no one else ever went to this park since you discovered it and it felt right. 

You’re drunk already and ankle deep in the pond. Erin is tipsy and tossing pebbles for the sound effect. Her hair was a bright orange due to a bad box dye incident that you had to convince her for two hours on the floor of her mother’s bathroom that she looked beautiful and it’s okay.

You’re kicking the water gently with your back flat against the dirty, small makeshift dock. Erin’s looking down at you while you tell her sad things. You close your eyes and pretend you’re somewhere else instead of here with a beautiful, intelligent, something out of a story book you wished was real woman, spilling out secrets meant for ghosts because once they rise inside of your rib cage, you can’t stop them until they force their way from behind your teeth.

“I- it happened,” you manage to mutter, “and then it… it kinda just, i dunno, kept happening.” 

You laughed in the empty space following, a space where there shouldn’t be laughter. 

Sometimes, you pretend you’re an anchor because there’s a significant difference between sinking and drowning, between mourning and morning that you can’t seem to stop fucking thinking about.

You peek one eye open, squinting at Erin and she’s frowning.

She isn’t saying anything and it makes you cringe on impulse. 

_Great, great, I’ve gone too far, I said too much. I’m too much and now she’ll see that, she’ll see me as a project of sorts with the manual on fire and she’ll leave, just like Amy._

That’s what happens, this happens, people leave and leave and leave. 

It still hurts.

“It’s good!” you blurt out after a minute, because you can’t stand silence, not anymore. You sit up quickly, head rushing and feet splashing as you pull your knees up to wrap your arms around like a pillow, “shit happens, Er. What doesn’t kill me… just weakens me.”

Shit happens. 

It happens, people leave and shit happens and it happens until it comes out of your throat like vomit, like a curse, and just when it feels better to stop trying, to die, to get a breath instead of a choke, a laugh instead of a grimace or a cringe, you feel frozen in icy heat. 

Shit happens and you wake up, and you go to sleep and you live in a repetitive fucked up state, all grey and ugly and god, you are trying so hard to not be ugly. 

Shit happens and you can’t talk about it because then people know and when people know, they know you’re weak. 

You look over at Erin, and Erin’s not laughing and tears threaten to spill over. You ruined whatever this is, whatever it could have been.

Your lips twist around and you try to learn how to un-talk, to unmake the mistake, coil up all of the garbage that is your life which isn’t even that bad anyway. 

I’m just whiny, I complain too much. 

“I’m good now.. I’m okay, it sucked at the time, yeah, but now.. I’m okay,” you lie, you say it because it feels like it should be something that is true, you’re surprised you can say it with feeling, without throwing up. 

You hate the way this conversation tastes on your tongue and you hate the way it makes Erin’s face look, like she’s trying to figure you out, dissect you like one the pond frogs on a filthy metal table with a scalpel too big for your small frame. 

Now that she knows, she can’t unknow, and it’s weird now, like she’s solved the problem and the equation is that you are a piece of a shit.

“I.. I am so sorry, Jill,” Erin whispers instead, the nickname accompanied by your favorite pair of fall-in eyes almost break you completely down the middle, “that’s so awful, that shouldn’t have happened.”

You bark out a laugh, because what else are you supposed to do? This is too serious, and you’re not good at that. 

You open your mouth to change the subject but Erin cuts you off with a shake of her head, “no, please. I’m here if you ever want to talk.”

She’s still looking at you with a curious glint in her wide eyes so you can’t look at her anymore, you look somewhere else, anywhere else, you spot a fish at the bottom of the pond and you wonder if they ever have to deal with the mundane cruelty their loved ones partake on them, and if they have ever felt lost and undeserving, if they’ve ever had someone listen to them for once, like you were right now for the very first time. 

You really hope they have.

“I love you,” Erin exclaims so softly that you almost couldn’t hear it. 

Oh. 

_Ohhhhh no. Oh god. Oh no, wouldn’t it have just been easier if she’d wave it off like no big deal? Your eyes still focusing on the bottom of the pond and you wish for a millisecond you were down there, too._

_Can’t we just make a joke and move on? Oh god, not this, not love._

_This wasn’t supposed to be a problem. I was supposed to stop feeling this about seven months ago when it started, when she came up to me that first day. I was supposed to wake up and realize it was just a silly crush and I wasn’t falling, oh god I wasn’t, I did? Did I? I did. I was supposed to cut it out or slow it down or ignore it into silence but now it’s back and it’s aggressive and fuck fuck fuck._

“I love you.” Erin repeats and in your head, you wish she would stop because it hurts.

You stifle a sob. 

“I’m glad it didn’t kill you but fuck, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

You don’t want to cry in front of Erin. Erin puts her hand on your shoulder and you flinch forcefully, cower away. 

You want to cut your own hands off, you don’t know what to do with them, you have a brief flashback that disappears as fast as it came.

Erin pulled her hand away, face translating guilt but you grab her hand slowly, place it back on your shoulder without looking up. You stare at her and nod, it was a very small nod but enough that Erin knew what it hinted at, she knows you well, and she continues, “Jillian, what happened to you.. was terrible, and you didn’t deserve it. this is not your fault. it was entirely wrong and not your fault.”

You don’t know how to handle that, you chew on your bottom lip in silence. You don’t know what to say, so you don’t say anything. Your left hand tugging at your ear lobe.

You don’t know where to go if Erin’s telling you that you didn’t deserve that and you’re still apologizing for taking up too much space in an a wide hallway. 

You don’t know what to do but buckle down and survive it. 

Because… what comes next if she’s right? What if she doesn’t leave like you expect? What if you wake up one day and the truth of the matter is that you did nothing to deserve this shitty, old life?

How do you come back from that?

“Shhh, it’s okay,” Erin says and it took until just then for you to realize you’d been openly crying this whole time, “you’re gonna be alright, i promise.” 

She holds you, and you can’t move and you can’t breathe, so you buckle down, you survive it and you let Erin hold you.

Three months after the park visit, you receive a call. It is a call you’d answer every single time but this time it was tinged with something so dark, it was tangible. 

You were outside and the street was wet and a giant exit sign flickered from darkness to blinding neon hues in the reflective surfaces. Erin wanted to be barefoot but knew it would be weird so instead, she sort of hovered around you while you smoked a cigarette and the awnings dripped above.

You started smoking to replace drinking as much as you do. Erin would tell you, neither of those habits are good for you, but you would exclaim, I’m trying my best, so Erin stopped.

It was dark out, and close to midnight and you both were taking a walk before it started to rain. You’d meant to only take several minutes until those several minutes became two hours. Erin wanted to stall going back to her own apartment as long as she possibly could without making anything awkward, without making you uncomfortable, you could tell.

Being alone right now was something Erin said she didn’t think she could handle, not tonight, you understood.

The hazy, blue darkness of the night that you’re not supposed to be out in looms over you, the kind of night that refuses you. It’s not warm but your knees were uncovered and Erin’s jacket was damp.

Your hair was tied into a hasty bun atop of your head and you’re still in your sweatpants and torn band t-shirt you put on for bed. Erin was wearing one of your beanies and her own sweatpants and also your hoodie.

This happens, sometimes. You only met Erin’s parents a handful of times. Erin’s mother doesn’t care about anything that isn’t herself, but Erin’s father is adamant she’s hanging out around the wrong kind of people.

_“That girl.. she always smells like cigarettes. Have you noticed that? She has that look, do you see the way she dresses? Does she hug you a lot?” he had said one night in particular to Erin over the phone. “Stay away from her, Erin. I don’t want any daughter of mine becoming a dyke.”_

Six years in the Catholic school her dad forced Erin into later and at age sixteen she could quote bible verses about how much God wants to spite people like her, like you.

It didn’t teach Erin about any of the things she felt when she held her friend’s hand after school or snuck kisses under the tower of the slide at the local park. Neither did therapy.

It made her mad, why didn’t anyone know anything about love? She had never wanted to hold someone’s hand so badly.

She could teach something about love better than them one day, she thought.

After that disheartening phone call from her father, she couldn’t contain her body from tossing and turning, her insides never comfortable enough to match with her outsides. She sees the hazy light of her phone blaring how late into the night it was, and hesitates for a while before dialing. When you answer after two rings, all scratchy voiced and soft, genuine tones, Erin began spilling insecurities and tear drops through the only line that connects you.

You showed up to her door fifteen minutes after hanging up. Your hair was in a bun and you were chewing peppermint gum. Erin opened her door and left space between herself and the door for you to come inside, but didn’t expect you to barrel her over with a hug that had more force than both of you combined and quadrupled. Erin leaves a darkening stain on your sweater from relieving herself of all of her sadness and you hold her until she can calm her breathing and shift from crying to wanting a distraction. You gladly agree to go on a short walk around the dark city to wander with her.

You’re playing with your lighter and you’re both standing under a lamppost in silence. In four months, you’ll both be going to different time zones as fast as your legs can take you but right now, the summer is too young, too soft to have a name. 

So, you stand there in silence under the guise of the moon and a dimmed, piece of shit lamp.

Erin watches you with a fascinated, wide eyed glint. Her brain over calculates, thinks in intervals of twenty.

20, 40, 60, 80, Erin’s in love with you and has been since sophomore year chem class, but she could never speak that out loud because she already told you that drunken afternoon in the pond and never spoke about it after you started to cry.

“Doesn’t it bother you that your dad says shit like that?” 

Erin leans her head against the wet post behind her, hair soaking in the rain, watching you as you flick your lighter again and again. 

The almost two years of friendship feels like a lifetime.

“I mean, does anyone feel good about their dad?” Erin asks softly, gentle.

You snort at that and stub out your cigarette, the silence falling over again.

Erin tries not to think about it.

Once, when she was twelve years old and small, her father threw a plate on the ground and later, when he retold the story, he said that Erin had done it, or that she’d made him. She couldn’t remember exactly how he lied about it, only that he had and it was the moment she had sort of recognized that he was fifty percent of herself as a person and that is fucking terrifying. 

The sign flickers behind them. You’re flicking the lighter again and passing it underneath your fingertips, “there’s a thin layer of molecules that stops me from being burned by this.”

Erin watches your hands, fingers skimming from finger to flame to finger - the glow reflecting off their eyelids, even though Erin knows she should be stopping you, it’s what she normally would do, but it’s not that kind of night. It’s the kind of night where there’s only the bad kind of quiet and the air is becoming a bit stale as minutes pass between them.

But you still play with your lighter, hair swaying with each bob of your head.

You unfold your free palm, holding it inches above the flame, “the further I get, the less it hurts,” you say. You don’t look up, don’t want to fall somewhere and not find your way back out.

Goosebumps are rising up and down both sets of arms when you begin to walk back in the mist, the lasting state of rain. Erin feels like you both were somewhere really close to an emotion, way too close to speak of it but she understands, she knows. Of course she does. She knows that these four months may be the only days they have. You might forget her and find someone with prettier hair who doesn’t cry a lot or flinch at car horns. Erin knows that she is much too afraid to tell you she wants all in. She feels she never really will.

“Um.. don’t grow a molecule coat too thick that you can’t feel warmth, Jill,” Erin manages to say without her voice giving out, “don’t go too far away. Y-you’ll get lost.”

You snort again but it sounds forced, cracked almost. “Too late.”

Erin looks up, she can’t see the moon anymore. She thinks of your lighter and the hand that she so desperately wants to hold but is too far away from her grasp, and how both of you are running on borrowed time before the cement can take you. She thinks of how you are both playing with any lighter you can find, balancing between the thin layer of DNA and personality, of destiny and fate.

You kept catching your fingers on lighters and Erin thought maybe this is how God kills her slowly.

“It’s okay, ya’know,” Erin stumbles out as they inch closer to her apartment, “who needs fathers anyway?”

You fall asleep in her bed to the sound of the rain pounding against the windows and Erin’s head tucked in the crook of your protective arms.

There’s a hint of light beginning to peak slowly beyond the clouds. It’s both too early and too late for anyone else to be on the highway. 

Erin didn’t want to visit her hometown alone and you were in the lab late that night, listening intently, empathy rolling off your face in waves. You understand what that’s like. So you blurted out that you would take the trip with her, if she wanted you to, and Erin didn’t hesitate agreeing, the words falling out of her once rambling mouth in a rush of an exhale and something that sounds like relief. She blames the quick answer on her nervousness and not something else entirely, even though we both know it’s because of something else entirely.

So you go, and you end up ramped on too much caffeine and carbs while Erin taps her fingers against the middle console in threes, caffeine only now beginning to catch up to her. The sun is now peeking over the horizon and the fog is becoming borderline deafening.  
“Thank you again, for coming with me,” Erin says, heart like a race car and eyes drooping from lack of sleep, “I hate this drive every time I have to take it. I always want to turn around and park at a motel and cry. I once did. Don’t tell anyone that. Forget I said that. I just, I probably would go crazy doing this alone so thank you, for this. I know you probably had something better to do and-,” she stops herself before her tendency to ramble increased, instead biting her lip and giving you a grateful smile.

You toss back a manic grin in return and if Erin pays as much attention to you as you do to her she most definitely would notice that you only smile with your eyes when you look at her, as if it is reserved for her because truly, you are starting to believe it is but don’t want to delve too deep into that. The silent acknowledgement resonates through the car that you would probably, without a doubt in a heartbeat, drive all night with zero sleep for an entire week with Erin and it would never anger or displease you. Quite the opposite.

“T’is not a problem, m’dear. Thank YOU for granting me access to your personal vehicle and letting me eat chips in it, too,” you look over at her and wink before looking at the road. Even with the amount of time you’ve known her, you still manage to make Erin blush and Erin still pretends she isn’t by looking anywhere that isn’t you.

You are growing restless with each mile, if your endless vent fussing and crossing and uncrossing of knees and should-be-dangerous-but-not-to-Holtzmann way you climb into the driver’s seat to put one leg underneath your bottom, or more comfortably lifting one leg out of the window has anything to say about it. You get like this sometimes, need to be doing something with your hands, your entire body if you can or else the jittery waves would become too constant and overwhelming.

As if sensing this, which she probably can at this point in their relation-friendship, Erin murmurs to pull off on the side to stretch their legs, so you pull off onto a hidden dirt road next to a large field where the grass is just starting to grow back. You’re in the middle of fuckwhere, USA, and there’s only mist and distant sounds of the highway and miles upon miles of meadow. The ground is wet from the rain of the previous night, and the air is starting to rise in humidity.

Erin lets out a large sigh and leans against the car, lifting her foot up to rest flat against the passenger door behind her. You busy yourself with hauling onto the roof of the car lay flat on your back, head hanging off the side near Erin’s shoulder, watching her from your upside down view of the universe. Your goggles are hanging haphazardly off your left ear, and Erin smiles gently at you.

You take each other in for a moment, because you have moments like these with Erin that you never have with anyone else and you admire it every day. 

Your hair is in a bun with a larger than life frizzy pompadour bouncing every time you move, which is every millisecond, dark green jumpsuit much bigger than you, with mismatched, wrong length striped socks that just worked.

Erin has a loose ponytail, growing slightly wet from the rainwater on the car, she’s wearing a dark purple cashmere sweater and a pair of your black joggers. She’s sporting no make up and you can’t stop staring at her mouth so you try to focus on her hair instead.

Erin’s staring intently at your Screw-U chain tied around your neck, out of habit. She looks at it differently now after you told her the stories about it when you’d sneak into her dorm room years ago and lay with her. It was the second time you ever cried in front of Erin, the first time being at the spot in the park, months after meeting. 

That night, you promised Erin you would make an identical chain for her too because you notice everything about her. At first, it was terrifying, uncomfortable even, for the both of you, how observant you became with Erin, but now, it seems to have heightened Erin’s fondness towards you which you can’t help but feel pride about.

You knew that Erin’s dad was bad news, understood without question why on Father’s day, you found the stressed out pile of tweed, physics and love hunched over her desk, silently crying because she didn’t think anyone would be at the firehouse that day. You didn’t ask why, never ask why, just came up to Erin and gave her a bone-crushing hug, and in an overt Scottish accent, politely asked if Erin would escort you on a coffee run, to which she agreed and you bought her favorite coffee and a scone. 

You didn’t force Erin to talk about anything that day, you understood, you let her come back to reality on her own terms as you danced and bopped around the lab to a song only you could hear.

“I could murder you out here, ya’know,” you whisper, it feels like that now, like whispering weather, the conversation floating away slowly with the fog, “nobody would look for weeks, even months.”

“Ha, that wouldn’t work, too predictable,” Erin mutters, it’s easier to talk like this, it’s safer, “you’re the obvious killer.”

You hum, tilting your head from left to right, to and fro, resembling a curious puppy meeting someone for the first time, tufts of curls falling of your bun onto your face, swaying with your movements in the breeze. 

“hmmm. I mean, I could always leave the country,” there’s a crack in your voice, sad and familiar but comfortable all the same. There it is. The small phrase making Erin’s stomach twinge, she kicks her shoes against the rocks, letting the words settle. 

It could mean anything if it were anyone else. Coming from you, it’s big to Erin, it’s like leaving behind a piece of yourself that makes you you. It’s two people hinting at the elephant on the big, bad dirt covered side road, miles away from home, but both too scared to actually delve deep into it, too scared to make it real, palpable. If it’s real, it hurts.

There’s too much hurt in shared experiences for a lifetime. There’s a problem in the theory, ignorance is bliss, a problem you knew.

“W- Do.. do you want to talk about it now?” Erin blurts out after a long silence.

You flip one hand, palm outwards, a healing burn on the back of your hand from an impulsive need to feel something, you examine your fingernails, avoiding eye contact.

“You’re leaving.”

“Yeah..” it comes out like an exhalation, regret, “I’m sorry.”

You shake your head rapidly, force too big for the closing space between you, “no, it’s all cool, not a problem, it’s just, but,” you turn your head to look up at the sky, you look even smaller than usual, huffing out a breath. You’re trying to choose the right words to fit the puzzle, to do this right for once.

“It’s selfish, ya’know? I feel like, like I’m not doing anything, like I’m biding my time, or something. I just, I don’t know, I- what happens next? What do I do? Do I go out and get a job that I don’t really want? What happens to us, this thing, or whatever we want to call it? What happens when you leave, graduate, and follow your dreams and my dreams lie there, rotting?”

You shuffle to lay completely on top of the car, spreading like a starfish, hair accumulating the rain drops and goggles falling off the car completely. Erin leans down to pick them up and puts them around her neck. She leans to lay her head in her arms, staring at you still.

“Every time I drive through a city, I think about.. how many people out there are actually living. Not doing what they love, or what they really want to do, but just living, doing something, because we need to make money, and they become accustomed to it, ya’know? like.. maybe they are starting to find good-enough, but they never get their first love, or the job they always wanted,” you turn to look at Erin, your eyes are bigger than any planet and twice as extraordinary, Erin can feel her throat closing in, “how long? how long until I stop striving for big things and.. and settle for a fold out-table making me happy?”

Erin takes a pause and lets out a breath, her head falling back against the window. It’s a lot to digest. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth and she feels the urge to spit, lay all of this forgotten and bloodied on the side of the road. 

She feels guilty for chewing and absorbing the taste while she has a future, albeit short-term, she understands. She understands a lot more than anyone thinks, with the exception of you. You know everything.

The restless nights and sobbing fits about her father, the feeling of inadequacy when compared to everything a little better than she is, a little brighter, bigger. She knows, of course, it’s the reason she started running, it’s the reason she jumped at the chance to say yes to a job prospect in another country, it’s the reason that when she pictures her graduation, she wants to hide in a bathroom and puke stomach acid until she passes out.

“You could kill me. Make it look like we stopped for coffee and someone attacked me,” Erin says after a few moments.

You look up at that, eyes unwavering, the stillness making Erin scared you’ll turn to stone, it’s not like you and she can’t handle it. It’s like all of the joy in you is gone.  
“All that… bright future you think I have would evaporate, poof, but you, you’d keep living. And yeah, maybe you’d have good-enough for awhile, but once you’re stable, once you’ve got good-enough, you’d have built a foundation, and the body you killed would sort of fade. All those mistakes you made. You’d have a future that wasn’t a wide door but instead, one you made. And that’s pretty frickin’ powerful.” 

It’s a shot-in-the-dark attempt at getting a semblance of a smile out of you, one she knew fell flat upon hearing you sigh heavily.

“yeah, yeah, I know. Lotsa famous people got started when they were older.”

“No, Jill, I meant, you’ve already started. You’re there.”

The sun is almost completely up by now and Erin needed a nap and you needed more coffee.

“If you’re not dead, you’re still living. Having this opportunity doesn’t guarantee me anything. I could flip the car the minute we get back into it.”

You already built back up the wall you let down, hopping off the car, boots making a loud thud on the rocks beneath you when you go to open the passenger door.

“Yeah,” you whisper and wink over the car roof at Erin, “but cha won’t.”

When you get back into the car, Erin pulls onto the empty highway heading to the nearest convenience store. 

And she doesn’t. 

“This was enough, it was.. it was worth it. I- I won’t get twenty-two years with anyone,” you briefly stop to breathe out a small, wet laugh, “fuck *hiccup* I’ll be lucky to get twenty-two months. No one will ever think they can spend more than two months with me, no one will ever want to come home to me.. no one will ever take someone like me to meet their parents *hiccup* I’m not.. I’m not the person people can love. I’m a lot, yaknow..”

You take a larger than life chug and stifle a sob in the crook of your arm, Abby tries to snatch the bottle but you hold it close to your chest and hold out your finger.

“I’m okay with that! I, I, I really really am. I’ve spent most of my life being okay with that, but then there’s Erin, and there is everything Erin is and everything she always, will always be, and she *hiccup* is, we.. we, we both knew she was going to leave. that it would hurt. She didn’t have to stick around long enough to fall in love with me, but

*hiccup*”

You sniffle and your eyes are flowing tears freely now and you try to swipe them before they can leave your face but there are so many. You hit your palms to knees in frustration. Abby holds your hand.

“...she cared about me enough to be gentle with me, and I needed that. That’s all I could have ever wished for.”

When Abby goes to bed that night, holding your fragile frame strong enough she hoped she could piece you back together, she silently wondered how it could have all gotten this fucked up.

You know everyone looks at you like something to be protected, don’t talk too loudly, don’t move too quickly, don’t touch your stomach, you flinch every single time.

You know everyone you’ve ever been in bed with looks at your scars and sees them as spots where you were vulnerable instead of spots where you were strong enough to heal.

Erin always looked at you like delicate, like glass, like hopefully she can make it through the night, through the hour.

Can we please just try to remember that where your skin was sensitive to break, it grew back tougher with a reminder that it will not be easy to hurt next time?

You swear to god, she could have hurt you as much as she wanted to if just meant she would have tried to stay and bandage you up after. You wish she would have just tried to stay.

She was too much good and for some reason, every time she touched you, your skin sizzled for a second.

You swear to god, she could destroy you if it means your last seconds will be with her.

You wonder if that guy is being good to her like you would have been. You hope this time you’re right for once.

Your parents were married for twenty-two years and they were so in love it’s disgusting. 

Your whole life, they kissed each other whenever they get home from work and your dad called your mom his queen and brought her flowers and she talks of him as if he held the moon and spoke in stardust.

Your whole life you wanted that. Your whole life you’ve been so scared to admit that you do. You want someone to look at you like that, like forever, like bring takeout and flowers for no reason but because you didn’t want to cook or leave the living room floor, like celebrate anniversaries every single month even after 365 of them.

You don’t admit it and you try to learn to be okay with that.

You let people touch you roughly and kick you out of bed, you drink and it burns more coming up than going down. You know everyone will leave and you have too many notebooks where you write about it.

During a drunken blackout, you only remember a dream you had that Erin and you were kids and walking alongside train tracks somewhere you can’t pinpoint.

Armadillos are segmented, you know, so they can slide plate tectonics skin.

You pretended you were brave when really you were writing and deleting a snapchat that could have came across as “a bit much”. Erin is pretending she’s relaxed when really the back of her eyes have a hunger that never stops.

“Uh, what’s up?” you ask, shoving your phone and hands into your pockets.

“In space, there is no such thing as up.”

“Our current orientation would suggest-”

“The sun!”

:”Ha ha, hilarious, you should be a comedian,” you roll your eyes but your smile remains intact.

“Do you hear that?” she asks, close to the ground, putting her hand on the train rail, reminding you of that day she kissed the radioactive ghost trap and your stomach had filled with many insects you could have thrown up, “it’s humming.”

“Let’s get out of the way.”

“Hang on.”

“Ugh. Okay, but my mom will be mad at you if I die tonight and can’t make it home in time to defrost the chicken.”

“It’s always like this.” She starts shaking really hard and you don’t ask for any clarification. 

“Do you think if we get hit by a train, we would still have to take finals?”

“I’m exhausted.”

It comes out all soft. Half lost between the wind and something coming. Your thoughts are as scrambled as the eggs that you had this morning and what was in your throat died.

You woke up with your stomach revolting.

You wanted to tell Erin about the day you woke up and apples tasted different.

The day you decide to come back to work, sober this time, Abby tries not to act too excited to see you but hugs you without warning and you relax into her.

You go upstairs and you start working aimlessly. 

You don’t know how long time has passed until you hear whoops and hollering downstairs and you think that Abby had just gotten soup that was perfectly made and that Benny was down there being bowed to.

You kind of wanted to see that. 

You run down the stairs, boots stomping down and then once you’re at the bottom, you feel woozy and ready to pass out.

Erin is here. She’s back. Has it really been a year already? 

She looks thinner than you remember but she’s just as beautiful as she’s always been, always will be. Her eyes still have some light.

You’re about to turn around and pretend you didn’t see her but she’s already looking at you and for the first time since the No Good Bad Thing, you both are standing across from each other. She looks almost afraid to get close to you, as if she will frighten you. You imagine you don’t look much better than she does. 

You try cracking a smile. “I’m happy you came back.” 

“I am too, it’s.. it’s so good to see you.. and everyone else.”

You close the distance and hug her and the collision feels so painful, you feel like you will disconnect from her covered with cuts from the debris but you hold on even tighter. You can feel Erin exhaling, it sounds like relief and you let out your own as well.

Patty and Abby join the hug and wrap their arms around you both and it somehow feels like maybe everything can be okay again, not the same but okay, maybe.

It was Monday afternoon.

The weather app determined a clear sky but the fog was thick and every window you passed on the way here had condensation dripping down the windows.

You noted that you used to draw your own interpretation of aliens and atom particles on the windows at all of the homes you ever lived in. You’d sign them with a radioactive symbol and a bat. A baseball bat, not the Chiroptera mammal although you loved them because you had recurring dreams as a toddler of your forelimbs adapting into wings so you could go anywhere you wanted. 

Erin was wearing a flowy pale blue knee length dress and sneakers and you try not to stare too much. She looks soft like this. It’s been a month since she came back and she hasn’t been the same and you don’t know how to react to her because if you get too close, there will be an explosion and blow up this little part of the universe.

Visiting the spot of the park where there was spilled rum and heartache all over the grass was Erin’s idea and it surprised you. You’re sprawled across the wet grass with your elbow cradled in your left palm and Erin with her knees tucked to her chest, eyes as cloudy as the vastness surrounding them using a piece of grass a whistle. 

You, ever the scientist, are watching her with wide blues glistening slightly. You bite onto your upper lip, sucking it kindly into your mouth in concentration as you examine Erin’s thumbs pressed against the blade of grass, blowing an intricate tune like she has trained for this since exiting the womb. 

_What would Erin say if I told her I never learned how to do that? Would she tell me to go back home, come back when you learn how to make music even from voiceless objects?_ You briefly wonder. 

Erin’s auburn hair was moving softly with the breeze that comes through more often now. Your leg is jittering a little more aggressively than earlier from the alcohol flowing freely through your veins. The pain radiating through your skin reminding you why you were holding your elbow upright. 

You fell from the rusted monkey bars while hanging upside down, bobbing your head side to side doing the King Kong roar and beating on your chest for emphasis. It was awesome and made Erin giggle. Well, it was awesome until you bent your elbow in the wrong way, I don’t think that my arm is supposed to do that, do you?, but all the while murmuring to Erin that she needs to stop worrying so much about it, I do this all of the time, you reminded her.

When someone touches you too much or worries too possessively, it makes you uncomfortable but you don’t like to talk about that, so you don’t.

“Weeeelp, the good news is that if you hurt it in the right way, it sort of just goes..numb, like frostbite!” You say instead of something more intense, grinning wildly at Erin and gritting her teeth simultaneously. 

Erin laughs and it melds into the breeze, blade of grass long forgotten as she finishes the rest of the rum & coke in a single gulp, “Kind of,” she says, “like me.”

You flinched inwardly. Luckily, Erin’s eyes are focused intensely on her dirty shoelaces. It’s a sore subject and your conversational skills only stray so far. You don’t know what to say to that, the words feel fuzzy and look too grey to put together and make sense. You lay your head flat against the grass. You watch the red of your elbow sink into a soft blue against your pale skin as you jab your palms into the soft dirt and push.

The radio silence is scary, deafening, like static. Every time you stretch your arm out, you feel and swear you hear it crack.

The strange thing is, you’ve been where Erin is and still get lost for words entirely. How do you say I don’t think he’s being good to you, what color is that?

“Uhh,” you say, words scratching your throat as you pour another liquid concoction into both of the bottles between them,”nobody should be hurting you, Er-bear.”

“Oh! Oh no no, no,” Erin puts her hands up slightly, there’s marker mixed with dirt on both of her palms, “no, please don’t think anybody is.”

You automatically feel a tightening in your chest, trying again to calculate how to properly use words. You know Erin’s skittish, know she worries about what other people think of her more than what she thinks. You know that the connection you once had with her isn’t that kind of friendship anymore, one that you could much easier say: _he’s showing signs of other kind of hurting. I know you think I don’t notice. I’ve seen how he talks to you._ “I just hope,” you swallow, hesitate, “you don’t feel really numb. It’s kind of a terrible and scary way to feel.”

Erin then takes that moment to grin at you. She actually fucking grins. Your elbow is most definitely cracked, you are two 25 year olds drunk in the middle of the day on the ground of an abandoned children’s playground talking in bruises and she’s grinning. The moment is too long and begins to feel thin like wire around an esophagus. Erin’s eyes are practically screaming help, I’m sorry.

“Oh gosh, no, Holtzy”, the nickname stings somewhere in your rib cage, rattles around hopeless, it’s the first time Erin’s used it since The Terribly Bleak Bad Thing and the leaving, Erin’s voice is flat like roadkill, “I feel fine.” She picks up her drink and focuses on her laces, “I’m fine,” she repeats and neither one of you know who she’s really trying to convince but you both don’t believe it, “trust me.” 

So, you try.

But you remember being six years old, a boy pushing you off the side of the big slide at recess. Names like “weird”, “crazy”, and “loser” mulling around the air as you clutched your arms around your injury. Your knee turning blue contrasting with the red of the blood and the brown of the mud. Realizing the colors were never going to fade into something stable, something that made sense.

“He’s only trying to get a rise out of you.” 

A rise meaning a reaction, a rise meaning don’t make a scene, it’ll let him win. Make no retaliation, let him keep playing, sit there and keep quiet, wipe your nose, clean your glasses off and limp back home.

It’ll be fine after a bit of time and a wicked cast, right?

_Maybe mom will sign it since dad’s six feet deep._

You want to talk to her about the night you walked into the firehouse, the sun is already down and your hands are pulsing to tinker on a project you thought about for the last two hours.

Erin had been back from Amsterdam for two and a half months at this time. She hardly stays the night like you do, because she has Phil waiting for her at another home and she has been dedicated to making him happy.

It feels strange and wrong, this friendship now. 

You come in through the back door and walk into Erin bent over on the floor. You watched her pick up a broken glass bowl with her bare hands, no emotion whatsoever in her soft blue eyes. Her fingers were bloody and scarred and her breathing was funny. 

The Erin you met in Chemistry class would have used a broom and dustpan, gloves, would have cursed you for not doing that because you could get hurt, Holtzmann, present Erin looked at you, eyes widening slightly, so far in her own head that she did not hear the loud opening and closing of the heavy metal door you entered. 

No one asks the questions that should follow a scene like this, because this was something you knew, something you didn’t have to use words for because you know how to tackle it with your hands. Your eyes flickered to the shards in her palms, her eyes glimmering with _am I supposed to apologize? did I fuck this up?_ , the apologies at the tip of Erin’s tongue already, but you moved into action before her voice did. 

You slowly approached her with your hands out in front of you, as if approaching a wild animal. Erin nods, answering the unspoken question is this okay? You gently grasp her elbow to stand her up with you and guide her to the couch they moved into the apartment. You walk to the medicine cabinet, grab tweezers. Abby always keep them in supply because they’re necessary.

“If you don’t look, it hurts less,” you softly murmur against her forehead, brushing your lips against it, “okay?”

Erin nods again, words not needed. It’s late, Patty and Abby are asleep in their own respective apartments and it’s quiet throughout the large firehouse with the exception of the somewhat calming buzzing from the machinery. You move slow, plucking the glass out one by one, setting the extracted pieces on a metal plate. Erin’s eyes are unfocused staring into the darkness of the windows.

For the past few weeks, everyone has noticed a slight downfall in Erin. Her lack of input in conversations, her diet lessening, the bags under her eyes growing darker despite the foundation applied that morning, the faraway look in her eyes becoming a constant. The signs are slight, quiet but obvious, painfully so. The mere topic being brushed around because Erin’s tearful, deer in the eye of the gun stare makes it all the more heartbreaking, and hard.

An hour after you get all of the glass out of Erin’s palms and clean it thoroughly, she teaches you how to tame your eyebrows. She’s gentle with you and you bite your tongue to keep from breaking. She held your face like you’re delicate and you can watch her determined face with that crinkle on her forehead and you can pretend that everything is okay.

You can pretend you are both okay.

But you don’t know how to talk about that.

You want to talk to her about how she knew what was happening the minute you flinched. At the bar where you were so on edge around her, your chest felt bruised from the ache.

It had been several months since you told her about what happened in your first year of college and the completely, totally painless, so so great summer after, and you silently wonder, not for the first time, if it made things weird. No one talked about it or the L word (the other one, not the television series) since.

Everyone was saddled in a booth seat of a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, you taught Patty how to stack cherry stems into a pyramid. Erin was sitting next to you, she was staring intently at you and you tried not to get your hopes up about what that meant. So what, you’ve been in love with her since she picked you to be her partner in chemistry class, so everything, you still are. 

A very drunk man slams his palms onto your table suddenly, your heart crashing to the floor with the cherry stems. Your shoulders went up to your ears and your eyes snapped closed too tightly, forming crescent moon tattoos into your palms with your fingernails. Erin knew about it without having to say anything. She was watching the whole time, she didn’t laugh. 

Scattered around, Patty man-handling the drunk man to the exit, Abby complaining to security, the tables nearby teasing to their buddies about your tight spiral of stress, Erin giving you subtle shushes and whispered breathing techniques.

“Are you okay?” Erin whispered to you, sincerity leaking around the words, like she really did care how you answered it.

You leave the question empty handed, burying your head into your hands and leaning into her open and warm embrace. You wish you could stay in those arms forever. You wish you could live in this quiet understanding.

You wish you could talk about this. You hope one day you can both say yes when being asked are you okay. You wish neither one of you had to be dishonest with an answer.

JH: hey er, i haven’t seen you around lately. how have you been?  
EG: hey, i am okay. a lot of stuff happening, i am sorry. how are you?  
JH: do you want to talk about it?  
EG: i’ll be okay. really, holtz.  
JH: are you busy tomorrow night? do you want to catch that new sci-fi with me? it will be RAAAAD  
EG: i would love to but phill is taking me to Boston for a conference, maybe another time?  
JH: oh. right, sorry. it’s fine. another time, yeah, safe travels EG.  
EG: are you mad at me?  
JH: are you happy with him?  
EG: i don’t know what you mean, of course i am happy.  
JH: okay, i believe you. have a great trip. i have to go.

It’s absurd, this distance.

You never used to know how to be this far away from each other before the Bad Thing.

One day, you woke up and you were ready to give Erin Gilbert your heart, let her tend to it like a bar on a late Tuesday night.

One year and five months ago, you woke up from a nap to a world without her in it. She wasn’t even dead. She was just gone.

You loved her in that small apartment, and she told you that she loved you too, you believe that she loved you there too.

That bed and that room and that zip code held these memories in a lock box and they will tell you that we were in love.

You had a panic attack the morning before Erin came back. 

Call it a premonition or call it like it is but what the fuck.

Why did you think you could be friends with her? You should’ve been honest. You should’ve told her you hated her guts, you should've made sure she knew how you felt earlier, you should’ve kept her number blocked and made sure that there was never again a way she could get her foot back in the door. 

When she texts you to come over, you stop wallowing, eat some cheez-its and tell her you’re on the way.

The sun was setting outside, and your shoulder to shoulder with Erin on her couch.

You began to binge watch the Twilight Zone because it had been so long since you’d seen it and Erin was all too eager to watch as well. Erin’s apartment hadn’t gotten much use since everyone practically moved into the firehouse but it’s nice to still have on nights like these, where you can hide under the covers and burrow into the couch holding Erin’s hand.

It’s nice to avoid thinking about the man in the powder blue suit twenty minutes away planning a dinner with Erin and the woman waiting for you to call her on the other side of town, avoid thinking about the storm cloud above your heads when you have to face reality outside of this studio apartment. But right now, you’re watching Barbara Jean Trenton lock herself away for the third time in her study to watch another film of hers and you keep stealing looks at Erin out of the corner of your eye.

You never thought you would see this again. 

She’s so beautiful, it physically aches. Your fingers itch to touch her, caress her cheek, kiss the breath out of her lungs.

Erin turns her head, slightly, smiles with all of her teeth. She leans her head to rest on your shoulder and you have to bite your cheek hard to keep from trembling. All of your senses are on fire and you almost choke on your own spit. What if this is just a really good dream?

This could be so easy. If this was a different place or a different time, this could be nothing short of amazing. In a different life, this could be them together.

But it’s not, because it’s this life and this time and maybe they could be in the future if you were a little better at regulating your emotions and Erin was a little better at revealing hers. 

You both fall asleep with legs touching and your arms instinctively find themselves wrapped tightly around Erin’s waist as an unconscious symbolism, please don’t leave again.

When Erin wakes up, eyes squinting in the newfound brightness of the living room, her neck aches and she briefly wonders how she could forget to go to her own bed until she realizes in the same second that you spent the night. It makes her relax, you stir when you feel Erin’s nose burrowing in the warmth of your nape. You kiss her forehead and flinch directly afterward, too quick for Erin to notice.

“Good morning, bedhead,” you rasp to fill the silence, voice filled with sleep and soft cracks. You muss up Erin’s hair for emphasis and smile. It’s too much.

Erin’s eyes suddenly change and before you can distinguish the change, she leans her head up and captures your lips in the softest kiss you have ever experienced, your hand automatically reaching up to softly grasp the back of her neck. 

There’s soft exhales, lips nipping, tongues escaping and it’s what you have always wanted, what you both deserved after all of the grime of the past year.

A sharp, ear-rupturing buzz the only thing that caused you to snap out of it. Erin’s phone flings off the end table and she jumps haphazardly to grab it.

“Shit, SHIT, I’m so sorry Holtz, you need to go. I am so sorry.”

Erin gets up hastily, fixing her wrinkled clothes to no avail. You cough to cover up the instinctive flinch.

“Oh yeah, yeah totally. I have some, pretty cool upgrades I’ve been cookin’ up, really grand stuff. Need to work on that. See ya later?” 

You open your arms for a goodbye hug, which is no different to how you say goodbye but this time, there’s a tinge of regret in the air and makes you tense. Even so, Erin bites her lip, nods and gives you a quick half-assed hug and rushes to get your shoes and jacket from the couch so she can clean up the previous night. 

If Phil knew you were here with Erin, alone, he wouldn’t be too happy and you get that Erin should have some kind of peace. She deserves that.

-

When you got back to your apartment, you checked your voicemail box and it’s from the woman you hooked up with a few times and she wants to get dinner with you for a change. You don’t return the messages and you take the bottle of scotch instead of the wine you picked up on the way here because even though it’s only four in the afternoon, nothing is the same and there’s something resentful and sad about that.

You climb into bed and the left side is so cold. Your train of thought leans into Erin’s side of the bed being cold but that’s not her side of the bed. She’s never been in this bed. You leave half of it empty in case she ever drops by but she never does.

You think of what her and Phil talk about, how she’s going to sit in his lap and play with his hair like she plays with your heart and she might tell him that she saw you but it will be so awkward so maybe she won’t.

Taking another drink from the bottle, letting it burn your throat until it’s raw and aching, you try not to think about how she sounded when she said _I hate how much I want this._

Another drink and your hand got wet when you touched your mouth, you are now realizing you have been leaking tears like you were a faucet in a home in the middle of nowhere and you don’t think about how Erin felt under your hands and under the stars and under you again.

You start to feel a little messy because you haven’t eaten since the bits of popcorn yesterday night with Erin, and you know that when you wake up, there won’t be a note and your hands will be empty.

You have a too big swig and start to sob, the noise so visceral everyone in the complex could feel their throats close up. When you wake up, it will be an empty morning (mourning) and your altar is in her wandering bones. Your first thought will be I want to go home.

She’s his, and she’s his, but you’re hers.

Someone started a fire at the playground you shared with her when your blurry eyes open the next morning.

_How fucking ironic._

**Author's Note:**

> if you read all the way through, please know i love you so much. any feedback or constructive criticism is welcome! i'm currently trying to kick writer's block show offy butt and delve into writing fics more again. i have a rough draft of a follow up to these characters so i will perhaps be back.
> 
> i would also like to give my thanks to all of the writers in this community, you have inspired me so much to push myself to write for the past twelve hours running on a three shot espresso, redbull and chicken rice. 
> 
> i would also like to thank my wonderful girlfriend who motivates and inspires me every day, and puts up with my constant need to strive to push myself to finish things i start. you make me want to be a better person every day. i love you, peony.
> 
> also thank you pc for keeping me sane this year. couldn't have done this without my family.
> 
> happy quarantining, blm and wear your fucking mask.


End file.
